Unknotting the Heart is an extraordinary ethnography that charts new territory in our understanding of the ways in which neoliberal governance, psychotherapy, and affective labor come together to shape subjects and subjectivities during mass unemployment as former socialist-style industries in China transform into global manufacturers. Based on many years of in-depth fieldwork in urban China, Jie Yang explores the plight of laid-off workers as the state psychologizes their condition and promotes what Yang calls “fake happiness.” Jie Yang brilliantly shows the tension between the Chinese state’s “therapeutic governance,” which employs western-style psychology, and the workers’ own attempts to deal with the astonishing transformations taking place around them. Jie Yang shows how therapeutic governance disrupts existing values and habits by promoting self-enterprising and self-reflective subjects who are expected to fit current market needs. This process further genders the population, often in traumatic and disturbing ways. As external and connected selves are pushed to transform themselves into internal and self-reliant selves, the therapists, not surprisingly, solidify their position as Communist Party authorities. Their combination of political and therapeutic roles legitimates and naturalizes their psychological knowledge and authority. Unknotting the Heart is an innovative, ethnographically nuanced, and theoretically sophisticated book about the contemporary condition. It is anthropology at its best. This is a contribution to anthropology at large, and it will inspire anthropologists and students of all sub-disciplines and all regions to think creatively and deeply for decades to come.

Hsu Book Prize committee chair Manduhai Buyandelger awards the 2016 Hsu Book Prize to Jie Yang for Unknotting the Heart.

The SEAA’s annual book prize is named for the late Francis L.K. Hsu (1909-2000), renowned cross-cultural anthropologist and former president (1977-78) of the American Anthropological Association. The Hsu Book Prize is given to the English-language book published in the previous calendar year judged to have made the most significant contribution to East Asian anthropology. 18 books were submitted for consideration for the 2016 prize from a diverse range of scholarly publishers.The 2016 Hsu Book Prize selection committee was chaired by Manduhai Buyandelger (2014 Hsu Book Prize recipient and Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT) and included Jong Bum Kwon (Associate Professor of Anthropology at Webster University), Glenda Roberts (Professor of Anthropology at Waseda University), and Priscilla Song (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis).

The deadline for submissions for the next Francis L.K. Hsu Prize (for books published in 2016) is May 1, 2017. For more information:

At the SEAA business meeting at the AAA annual meeting in Denver the winners were announced for Book Prize, Best Student Paper, and (even numbered years) Media Production.
A short description follows, together with a link to the full description by the selection committees.

The 2015 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize Winner is Rian Thum. 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Harvard University Press.

Rian Thum’s The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History is an extraordinary accomplishment that advances our understanding of sacred traditions of pilgrimage, local senses of history, and politics of nationalism. The book redefines the fields of Xinjiang history and Uyghur studies in a way that scholars in these fields will now have to take into account…
… Indeed the relative paucity of historical sources on the region in Turkic languages that Thum works with (rather than Chinese) may well be a source for the book’s creative methodology and a reason the book is so good.
Amazon entry, http://tinyurl.com/hsu2015thum

“Modeling History: How Chinese Local Officials and Designers Meet in Museums” (Leksa Chmielewski Lee, U.C.-Irvine) and

“Negotiating Masculinities through the Game of Distinction: A Case Study of MOBA Gamers at a Chinese University” (Siyu Chen, U. Oslo)

For this year’s Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper, there were 23 applicants. Most of these were remarkably good papers indeed, and could, with a little polishing be publishable within a wide range of anthropological journals. In a unanimous decision the three judges for the Bestor Prize—Sealing Cheng, Joshua Hotaku Roth, and Gordon Matthews— found that three papers stood out for closer comparison. The result was an award tie and one honorable mention.

In a tied vote the judges awarded this year’s prize to Leksa Chmielewski Lee (University of California, Irvine) who wrote “Modeling History: How Chinese Local Officials and Designers Meet in Museums” and to Siyu Chen (University of Oslo) who wrote “Negotiating Masculinities through the Game of Distinction: A Case Study of MOBA Gamers at a Chinese University.”

For honorable mention the judges chose Suma Ikeuchi (Emory University):
“Of Two Bloods: Nation, Kinship, and Religion among Nikkei Brazilian Pentecostal Migrants in Japan.” Like the authors above, this paper is another example of the artful weaving together of ethnography and theory in a whole that transcends the sum of its parts.

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SEAA is committed to developing international channels of communication among anthropologists throughout the world. We hope to promote discussion and share information on diverse topics related to the anthropology of Taiwan, PRC, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea; other societies/cultures of Asia and the Pacific Basin with historical or contemporary ties to East Asia; and diasporic societies/cultures identified with East Asia.